Machine translation (MT) is a growing field in translation wherein the translation from one language to another is performed by a computer typically without human interaction. MT can be used to automatically translate sources such as speech, text, audio, web page, online article, social media post, tweet, and etc.
Two common MT techniques used today are rule-based MT and statistical MT. In rule-based MT, linguistic structures and grammatical rules are taken into account along with special bilingual dictionaries to translate sentences from a source language to a target language. Statistical MT generates translations based on statistical models whose parameters are derived from the analysis of bilingual text corpora.
In either rule-based or statistical MT system, translating may involve transliteration of at least one or more words. Transliteration is a character-by-character translation technique wherein characters of a given language are matched with corresponding characters of another language. The MT system may resort to transliteration due to an incorrect spelling in the source or the word being unknown to the MT system. Transliteration is highly error prone and typically requires human intervention for accurate translation.